| David Garcia via nettime-l on Mon, 15 Jul 2024 15:55:45 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| Re: <nettime> Ocular facts |
Don’t Let the Devil Have all the Best TunesWhy do centrists Fail? Because centrists are usually 'technocrats' who see politics as a process of piece meal problem solving based on focus groups. They often have poor story telling skills. The very word ‘progressive’ invests hope in the future whereas the right is more inclined to deploy nostalgia. Take BACK control or Make America great AGAIN.
Can the left deploy nostalgia? I was recently inspired by an article by novelist Zadie Smith who wrote of how she used to “have fun with her American audiences… Telling quirky tales of functional healthcare and education systems free at the point of use … But then came the moment when those stories came to feel not just outdated, but like ancient history. Or, more specifically, like a fairytale about a lost world, the postwar world, “A world that – though very far from ever being perfected – remains the closest my country has ever come to anything resembling social equity.”
“But as the years passed”, she concluded that “the whole matter of the past was becoming unmentionable, particularly in front of the young. It sounded like the kind of generational taunting… Who wants to hear this stuff? Who wants to hear about decent social housing, free education and world-class medical care when you can’t pay the rent, the neighbourhood school is failing” So she kept her fond memories of a functioning country to herself” . “But these days” she argues “that historical nostalgia should not be the sole preserve of the right. The left can also make use of it. We can remind ourselves that a more just society is possible, if only because a few of the necessary conditions have at various moments actually existed upon this Earth, and in the not-so-distant past. With this in mind, she began thinking of the circumstances of her youth not as a fairytale or as an impossible fantasy, but as a real-life thing that did happen and might happen again.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/03/zadie-smith-on-hope-trepidation-and-rebirth-after-14-years-of-the-tories -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: https://www.nettime.org # contact: [email protected]